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“I’ve never met nobody that got away with anything, ever”. So says Tanner Howard, one half of the pair of bank-robbing brothers in Hell or High Water. It’s an understandable world-view coming from a low-level criminal, a man recently released from prison to a slowly dying part of Texas, where nobody seems to have two dollars to rub together besides the banks and the oil wells. He’s determined to help tip the scales in favour of his brother Toby and Toby’s estranged family, but while the film follows the brothers sticking it to the banks and a pair of aging Texas Rangers pursuing them, Tanner’s words are a pretty clear statement of where things are going. Following on from last year’s Sicario, screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has put together a world that’s morally grey, but not totally bleak. The kind of world where nobody gets away with anything, ever. Or almost nobody.

There are moments in Hail, Caesar! where it really feels like the Coen Brothers have put together their greatest comedy ever, a broad and absurd send up of Old Hollywood filled with classic cinema references and thinly-veiled analogues that brings all the age’s greatest fears of decadent miscreants and godless Communists to bear, a non-stop circus that needs some sense slapped into it by studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) But while Hail, Caesar! is always beautiful to look at and often hilarious to listen to, the day in the life of Mannix we see in the film has too much going on to add up to a satisfying conclusion, or even the unsatisfying conclusions typically favoured by the filmmakers.